helleborine - 8:33 pm on Nov 8, 2004 (gmt 0)

Google results appear stale because of their slavish reliance on backlinks. I see sites that have not been touched for 5 years at #1 for some terms simply because of old links, no reflection of quality or content at all.

That why I would guess, and hope, that a major tsunami is coming our way.

In my little corner of the web, there is a very high ranking link page (in fact, an old link FARM, no less) that hasn't been touched since 2001, the webmaster's address no longer exists, and half the links are dead. But it sure comes up high in the SERPs!

Then, there's that PR0, keyword-stuffed, say-nothing, phony directory subdomain page with only two links, also high in the SERPs.

And the immovable #1 is a trashy, affiliate-loaded page that has garbage links and advertising all over the place, but hey! They've been on the web for nearly 8 years. Zero value, #1 for at least 5 years! Again, it's depending on stale links from pages that have not been updated in since the Flood.

It's not Google's fault, it's our fault for creating pollution on the web instead of real content, content that people want, rather than content we want to impose on people to make money.